Brexit, we were told, was all about regaining Britain’s “sovereignty” and being in control of our own destiny. But big money in British politics is a more significant threat to our future than unelected EU bureaucrats ever were.
Even though the Brussels bureaucrats have been removed from the equation, people still don’t feel they have a proper say in how this country operates. One big reason for that is the amount of money, often from opaque sources, sloshing around our political system.
Have you ever thought that the national picture painted by the likes of Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, and Rishi Sunak differs significantly from the one you see when you look around your own family and friends? You’re not alone.
Britain ranks among the most socially liberal countries in the world on key issues, and a substantial majority now reject many of the established economic assumptions of recent decades. But you won’t see any of that reflected in the current government’s agenda. Westminster is becoming an island of irrelevance, increasingly detached from the concerns of ordinary people.
There’s a reason for that. The government cannot hear the concerns of ordinary people over the hubbub of wealthy donors and other lobbyists with shady financial backers.
As part of our Parliamentary work, we’ve been researching just how broken the system is. In this longer-than-usual email, we’d like to share some of that with you.
Dark Money and Foreign Influence
The UK has particularly lax campaign finance laws. As a result, many donations get through that probably shouldn’t. Yes, there are permissibility requirements in place, but there are plenty of ways to evade them if you want to.
The term “Dark money” refers to donations whose origins are untraceable. Because the ultimate source cannot be confirmed, there is no way of knowing whether that money comes from the kind of person or organisation that shouldn’t have influence over our lawmakers.
One example of dark money is the “Proxy Donation”. These are donations made by one person, who would not be a permitted donor, in the name of another who is. Some examples include:
Ehud Sheleg, art dealer and former Conservative party treasurer, gave over £600k to the Tory party. Documents later showed that the money originated in a Russian account of Sheleg’s father-in-law – a former official in the old pro-Putin regime in Ukraine. Proxy donations are a complete blindspot in the law, so there was no legal mechanism to hold him accountable for it.
Lubov Cherdukhin – back at it again – gave money to the Conservative party while her husband was receiving funds from business deals with sanctioned Russian oligarchs. She gave £50k to the Tories 8 days after Putin invaded Ukraine.
Mohamad Amersi has given over £200k to the Conservatives and worked closely with Boris Johnson on key policy decisions. Prior to the donation, he was given a large deposit from a Kremlin-linked company secretly owned by Putin’s telecoms minister Leonid Reiman.
“Shell Companies” are another way for dubious donors to evade the rules. According to Transparency International, 14% of LLPs established in the UK between 2001-2021 (21,000 companies) show signs of being shell companies. Here are some examples:
Conservative mega-donor Lubov Cherdukhin, who once paid £160k to play tennis with Boris Johnson, was being paid out by a shell company secretly owned by Russian senator and Putin ally Suleiman Kerimov, according to the BBC.
The offshore company Aquind is owned by a former Russian oil magnate and a Russian arms manufacturer. The company has donated heavily to the Conservative party.
Top Labour MPs Wes Streeting, Yvette Cooper, and Dan Jarvis received a combined £345,000 from a company called MPM Connect Ltd, which has no staff or website and is registered at an office where the secretary had never heard of the company.
“Unincorporated Associations” are nebulous groups with little oversight or legal classification. It’s essentially like ticking the “miscellaneous” box on a donation form when asked what kind of organisation you are.
Tory minister Steve Baker’s “Covid Recovery Group” organisation (a parliamentary coalition of anti-lockdown Conservative MPs) received tens of thousands from a UA called the Recovery Alliance. It has no digital footprint, no registered members, and its finances are completely opaque. Opendemocracy has linked it to a number of other covid conspiracy campaigns and anti-lockdown groups.
Richard Cook’s “Constitutional Research Group” – of which he is the only listed member and chair – gave £435,000 to the DUP’s Brexit campaign. No one knows for sure where the money came from, but investigative journalists discovered his involvement in a number of illicit trades, including underground trash-dumping and fire-arms sales.
According to Byline Times, 29 different opaque UAs donated £14 million to the Conservative party between 2010-2022.
Big Money
Between 2001 and 2021, one-fifth of all political donations in the UK came from just ten men with an average age of 70. If that doesn’t indicate that we have a big problem, we’re really not sure what would.
While there’s nothing inherently wrong with political donations, huge amounts of money coming from multinational corporations and the mega-rich does raise questions about who really calls the shots. Especially when they seem to get things in return.
Here are some situations where extremely wealthy individuals and corporations used their financial heft to influence things:
In 2021, the Conservatives received £400k in donations from oil and gas companies while the government was deciding on new oil and gas licences.
More generally, the Tories took over a million from oil companies between 2019 and 2021.
From 2020-2022, the Conservatives took £15 million from the financial services industry, which they were certainly kind to when it came to dealing with banker’s bonuses.
Labour MP Wes Streeting received £15k from John Armitage, former Tory party donor and manager of a hedge fund that owns half a billion dollars in US health insurance and private healthcare. Streeting recently came out in support of private hospitals.
The “Leader’s Group” is a dining club of Tory super-donors that has given over £130 million to the party since 2010. The club’s billionaires and business moguls have been known to dine with Boris Johnson.
In 2022-2023, controversial groups, including gambling giants, climate sceptic organisations, and evangelical Christian groups, made over £1 million in donations for staffing the Labour front bench. Recipients include MPs Wes Streeting, Rachel Reeves, and Yvette Cooper. Reeves alone received nearly £250k.
Recently, Crossbench peer Caroline Cox received large donations from American evangelical Christian activists against gay marriage that used hateful language about Muslims.
While the Conservatives often top the list when it comes to money in politics, remember that this is a cross-party systemic problem. The real issue is that the rules that are supposed to prevent the wealthy from buying influence just aren’t strong enough. We’ve allowed a situation to emerge where money can buy outcomes almost directly, and the mechanisms to detect the sources of that money are ineffective. Our system just isn’t fit for the 21st century.
The first step to fixing any problem is admitting that there is a problem. Our political system is addicted to money, to the extent that we’re now shutting real people’s voices out on a regular basis.
As you know, Open Britain’s mission these days is to deliver a democracy that works for everyone, not just the rich and powerful. That means a political system primarily driven by people, not primarily driven by money. That’s what democracy was always meant to be about.
As you might expect from what you’ve read above, we don’t take donations from shady think tanks or Russian oligarchs. All our work is funded directly by you, our supporters. We believe that having our work funded through small donations from a large number of people is the healthiest model of all, one that allows us to say what needs to be said to whoever needs to hear it. We hope you agree.
CGTN News published a table this afternoon comparing America’s per capita spending on healthcare with the rest of the world. America tops it with over $12,000. The next most expensive is Germany with over $7,000. Britain is much lower down the list with over $5,000. Down at the bottom was Poland. Obviously, the list was confined to countries in the western, developed world. What is important is that America’s private healthcare system is far more expensive than the continental healthcare systems, which are either state-owned, like Britain’s and Sweden’s, or funded through a mixture of state and private insurance. The idea that somehow private healthcare systems are more efficient and less expensive, promoted by the Tories and swallowed whole by the Blairite right of the Labour party, is frankly a lie. One of my friends trained as a doctor. He told me that many American hospitals are being kept open because of discreet state funding. But you won’t hear that from the Torygraph, GB News, Tory MPs like Daniel Hannan and grubby right-wing internet hosts like Alex Belfield, now enjoying a well-deserved holiday courtesy of His Maj. This will not surprise anyone who’s read any of the great books against the privatisation of the NHS by people like Jack Davis and Ray Tallis.
Reject the lies. Defend the NHS, and stop the Tories.
With the NHS crisis the Tories the Tories have created, the sharks really are circling in the water. Nana Akua of GB News seems to be one of those plugging its privatisation, along with broadcaster, stalker and jailbird Alex Belfield. And now they’ve been joined by Our Favourite Internet (non)Historian, Simon Webb. He put up a post this morning with the title ‘What’s So Bad About Privatising the NHS?’ It’s short, but I haven’t watched it on the grounds that I’d find it too infuriating. Webb is, of course, far right, and seems to get most of his views from the Torygraph, which has also been pushing this nonsense. As someone who takes history seriously, Webb should know what an immense difference the NHS and the welfare state made to the lives of ordinary Brits. I’ve blogged about it, citing my sources. But some of those I’ve used were by social worker types, the kind of people the Tory party has been trying to discredit for donkey’s years, and so someone like Webb would simply ignore them out of hand. But I’ve also used books from the time looking forward to the foundation of the NHS, as well as Jackie Davis’ and Ray Tallis’ excellent NHS – SOS. In contrast to what the privatisers will tell you, private healthcare is not more efficient. It’s less. Private hospitals are smaller, and in order to make a profit private healthcare largely ignores the long-term sick in order to concentrate on people who are mostly well. When private healthcare companies have taken over doctors’ surgeries in this country, they’ve closed down those they consider unprofitable, leaving thousands without a doctor. Also, private healthcare spends a large proportion of their running costs on administration, so as a consequence these costs have risen in the NHS as a consequence of its privatisation.
At the moment there seems to be a trend among the political class to be looking at the continental healthcare systems, where medical costs are paid by a mixture of state and private health insurance. But this also neglects the simple fact that these countries also spend much more on their healthcare generally than we do. The privatisation of the NHS won’t improve healthcare, but it will give private healthcare firms the support of the state sector, which is what they want.
And it seems to me that what the Tories really want is a completely private healthcare system, funded by private health insurance, like America. And that really would be disastrous. Except for their corporate friends, of course, who would get all those great profits.
A few years ago I wrote a book and a pamphlet against the privatisation of the NHS. Here’s their description. The pamphlets are available from me, if you want one, while the book’s available from Lulu.
Privatisation: Killing the NHS, by David Sivier, A5, 34 pp. This is a longer pamphlet against the privatisation of the NHS. It traces the gradual privatisation of the Health Service back to Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, John Major’s Private Finance Initiative in the 1990s, the Blair and Brown ‘New Labour’ governments, and finally David Cameron and the Conservatives. There is a real, imminent danger that the NHS will be broken up and privatised, as envisioned by Andrew Lansley’s, the author of the Tories’ Health and Social Care Act of 2012. This would return us to the conditions of poor and expensive healthcare that existed before the foundation of the NHS by the Clement Atlee’s Labour government in 1948. Already the Tories have passed legislation permitting ‘healthcare providers’ – which include private companies – to charge for NHS services.
The book is fully referenced, with a list of books for further reading, and organisations campaigning to preserve the NHS and its mission to provide universal, free healthcare.
Don’t Let Cameron Privatise the NHS, David Sivier, A5, 10pp.
This is a brief critique of successive government’s gradual privatisation of the NHS, beginning with Margaret Thatcher. Tony Blair’s New Labour were determined to turn as much healthcare as possible over to private companies, on the advice of the consultants McKinsey and the American insurance companies. The Conservatives under David Cameron have continued and extended Blair’s privatisation, so that there is a real danger that the NHS, and the free, universal service it has provided for sixty-five years, will be destroyed. If the NHS is to be saved, we must act soon.
Here’s the video I made years ago for my book against the privatisation of the health service.
I also put up this video, which only four people have watched, asking people to vote Labour to defend the NHS. I hope people will, as some Labour MPs will defend it. But I’m not at all sure about Starmer.
Okay, a few years ago – I was when Cameron was in power – I was so worried about NHS privatisation that I wrote a couple of pieces of literature about it. One was just a pamphlet consisting of a few pieces of A4 folded together giving the main points about NHS privatisation and how it was killing the health service. Another was a short book, Privatisation: Killing the NHS, which I self-published through Lulu, the print on demand service. Since doing so, I’ve had next to zero interest in them. I have a page about them on this blog. Simply go to the relevant bar, and look at ‘pages’ and you’ll find them there, along with other books I’ve self-published. Here’s the pieces about them from that page.
Don’t Let Cameron Privatise the NHS, David Sivier, A5, 10pp.
This is a brief critique of successive government’s gradual privatisation of the NHS, beginning with Margaret Thatcher. Tony Blair’s New Labour were determined to turn as much healthcare as possible over to private companies, on the advice of the consultants McKinsey and the American insurance companies. The Conservatives under David Cameron have continued and extended Blair’s privatisation, so that there is a real danger that the NHS, and the free, universal service it has provided for sixty-five years, will be destroyed. If the NHS is to be saved, we must act soon.
Privatisation: Killing the NHS, by David Sivier, A5, 34 pp. This is a longer pamphlet against the privatisation of the NHS. It traces the gradual privatisation of the Health Service back to Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, John Major’s Private Finance Initiative in the 1990s, the Blair and Brown ‘New Labour’ governments, and finally David Cameron and the Conservatives. There is a real, imminent danger that the NHS will be broken up and privatised, as envisioned by Andrew Lansley’s, the author of the Tories’ Health and Social Care Act of 2012. This would return us to the conditions of poor and expensive healthcare that existed before the foundation of the NHS by the Clement Atlee’s Labour government in 1948. Already the Tories have passed legislation permitting ‘healthcare providers’ – which include private companies – to charge for NHS services.
The book is fully referenced, with a list of books for further reading, and organisations campaigning to preserve the NHS and its mission to provide universal, free healthcare.
If you would like one of the pamphlets, please get in touch using the contact form below. All details will of course be kept strictly confidential, and will not be passed on to third parties. If you only want single copies of the above, let me know and I’ll post them free to you.’
Now with the NHS facing a truly devastating crisis and the Tory and hard-right sharks circling and demanding its privatisation, I want to get these out to as many people as possible. And I’d be grateful for any ideas.
Of course, one way would simply be to have multiple copies of these pamphlets printed off and to set up a stall in town, and especially right when there’s a strike. But I only have a very small number of copies of the books around at the moment. Also, the myeloma means that I am not as mobile as I once was, and the council and bus companies in their infinite wisdom have cut the direct route from where I live into the centre of Bristol. But I’m hoping this might still be an option.
For the self-published book, one solution might be to go to see the buyer for my local branch of Waterstone’s and see if they would be interested in stocking it.
I’m also considering writing to my local Labour party and asking if they would be interested in stocking them, as well as contacting my local Labour MP to see if she would also like copies. I’m hesitant to do this, however, as I put the blame firmly where it lies – not just with Thatcher and the Tories, but also with Blair and New Labour. Kier Starmer is a true-blue Thatcherite and devoted follower of Blairism. He has said some ominous things about using the private sector to aid the NHS, even though it’s due to privatisation, as well as underfunding, that is responsible for this crisis. The local MP for south Bristol, Karen Smyth, is very firmly on the side of the health service, but she’s also an admirer of Starmer. Reading her messages about the health service, while she says much about how it’s been run down, she doesn’t condemn outsourcing. I can therefore see the pamphlets being extremely unwelcome in certain right-wing Labour circles.
Beyond this, any suggestions?
I’d be interested to know if there are any left-wing organisations that would be willing to accept copies of the book and pamphlet and/or publicise them. I’ve tried looking on Google for small press associations and organisations that might be suitable, but none have so far turned up. One possibility could be contacting some of the left-wing news and comment sites on YouTube and the Internet, but I’m not sure how willing they’d be to say anything about them. I haven’t had much luck in the past when I sent some of my literature to the Canary and a few others.
If you therefore have any ideas, please let me know in the comments section below.
Here’s further evidence of the Tory campaign to run down the Health Service until they can sell it off and introduce an American-style private healthcare system where people have to pay for their care through private health insurance. I’m ashamed and horrified that this man comes from own, fair city of Bristol. According to Sky News, Javid has an opinion piece in the Times (prop: the Dirty Digger) pushing the idea that the health service should charge people going to their doctors and Accident and Emergency with means-tested fees in order to cut waiting times. Javid says that this would follow Ireland, Norway and Sweden, and the appreciation of the Health Service should become a religious fervour blocking reform. The broadcaster also notes that Sunak himself wanted people charged for missed appointments, but was forced to withdrawal that nasty suggestion. Sky’s report says that the current PM till the next one says that he is not considering the idea. Wes Streeting, in a rare occasion of standing up for proper Labour values, said that it would violate the 75 year old founding principle of the NHS that treatment should be free at the point of delivery. Only Labour, which set up the NHS, could properly reform it, and that the imposition of fees would happen ‘over my dead body’.
Well said. I just wish I could believe him.
Of course the Tories hate the NHS as it’s a nationalised service. They don’t understand or sympathise with the principles underlying it and so want it privatised. We’ve already seen another right-wing maniac from their benches calling for it to be run ‘like a business’. These people have their voices magnified by appearing on GB News, where they spout the same nonsense, along with newsreaders and commenters like Nana Akua. As for the nonsense about this cutting waiting times, that’s really only a pretext. I went to a meeting of my local Labour party a few months ago in which the Tories’ attack on the Health Service was being discussed. Someone there said quite clearly that the health service was in particular danger because of the pandemic because the Tories never fail to exploit a crisis. And now Javid has raised his head above the parapet to prove it.
The Sky report states that Javid will not be seeking re-election at the next election. Which is why he probably feels free to make this monstrous suggestion. He has nothing to lose. Unfortunately, his mentality is still shared by his party, and will remain there long after he’s gone.
As for the Labour party, I very much doubt that Starmer will honour his promise to make doctors state employees. He has also said he wants to make a rational use of private industry to clear the backlog. Over the past decade, doctors’ surgeries have been acquired by private healthcare companies like Circle Health, who have then sought to maximise profits by sacking staff and making working conditions worse. The standard privatisation modus operandi. Blair was enthusiastic about privatising the NHS, and Starmer shares the same ideology. He also said something about making a rational use of private healthcare companies. I honestly doubt that he will stop the privatisation of the NHS once he gets his behind in No. 10. If he allows private healthcare companies to continue to acquire doctors’ surgeries, then obviously the doctors working there will not become state employees. Starmer has massive previous for breaking promises, and I think it’s very clear that he intends to break this one.
But the main threat meanwhile is the Tories.
Get them out before they privatise the health service and start charging for care.
This deeply concerns me. A few days ago the mellifluous Irish left-wing vlogger, Maximilien Robespierre, posted a video asking if Keir Starmer was planning to push the privatisation of the NHS even further if or when he gets into 10 Downing Street. I didn’t see more than a few seconds of the video, but it seemed to be based on Starmer’s cagey response to how he would solve the country’s current crises. While Starmer has promised to repeal the anti-strike legislation, which would definitely be a great step if he actually does it, he answered that question by stating that Labour would not be spending its way out of these problems. This looks like an attempt to assure Tory voters that Labour is now fiscally responsible and no longer the high-spending party of traditional Tory caricature. But the current problems in the Health Service and other sectors are partly caused by decades of cuts and underinvestment. In the case of the NHS, the funding has also been gobbled up by increased administration expenses created by privatisation. So where is this extra investment, and improved services, supposed to come from? Blair tried to solve this by pushing the NHS’ privatisation further than Tories had dared. Not only were further NHS services outsourced to private healthcare providers, but he also created the Community Care Groups of doctors, who were responsible for commissioning medical services. These CCGs were granted the powers to buy in private medical services, and to raise additional income privately. Starmer is a Blairite, as shown by his vehement persecution of the Labour left and embrace of neoliberalism. One of the great commenters on this blog has suggested that he’s an admirer of the Swiss healthcare system. This is a mixture of state and private medical insurance, the degree depending on wealth. In the case of the very rich, it’s all, or nearly all, funded by private health insurance. In the case of the poor, it’s state-funded according to whether they can afford a level of private insurance. I have a feeling Nick Clegg of the Lib-Dems believed in the same kind of continental system. This obviously violates the fundamental principles on which Nye Bevin founded the NHS: that it should be universal and free at the point of delivery.
No-one wanted Blair to push through his NHS privatisations and there was electorally no need for it. By the time Blair was elected in 1997 the country was so thoroughly fed up of Tory misrule and their policies that Blair could have pursued a traditional Labour policy of renationalising it as well as funding it properly. But Blair was a Thatcherite and intensely concerned to get the Tory press and Tory voters onside, to the point that Rupert Murdoch has been described as an invisible presence at cabinet meetings. Blair’s pursuit of Tory policies left traditional Labour voters and members feeling betrayed and disenfranchised and the party lost both. They only continued winning elections because the Tories were worse.
I joined the Labour party a few years ago, inspired by Corbyn’s commitment to genuine Labour party policies and the protection and renationalisation of the NHS. I really don’t want to see it privatised by Starmer as Blair did.
If Starmer does push through further measures to privatise it, not only will he betray this country’s working people, making them poorer and with less available healthcare, then it will also have disastrous consequences for the direction of politics in this country. The recent surge of identity politics following the Black Lives Matter protests back in 2020 has also resulted in a backlash and the appearance of anti-woke parties further to the right, like Reform, led by Richard Tice, and Laurence Fox’s Reclaim. If working people become alienated from politics because whichever party you choose, economically they’re all the same, it leaves the way open for the far right. That was shown very clearly in Margaret Hodge’s neck of London, where Hodge did so little to tackle the rise of the BNP that the stormtroopers at one point had seven members on Tower Hamlets council. Their fuehrer, Derek Beacon, even sent her a garland after their squalid electoral victories. What has been shown to work against the fascist parties and unite working people of different ethnicities and religions is effective, traditional Labour welfare policies. These are desperately needed in themselves, but without them there’s the possibility that Britain may go the same way as the continent in the rise of extreme right-wing nationalist parties.
Renationalising the NHS and restoring the welfare state will not only massive improve the health, wellbeing and prosperity of the British working people, but will do much to stop the racial division and alienation fuelling the drift towards the parties of racial division, friction and resentment.
Mad ultra-brexiteer Mahyar Tousi is highly delighted with the latest promotional film from Richard Tice and the wretched Reform Party. He showed it on one of his videos earlier today or yesterday. The film shows a hammer striking a piggy bank with the message that pensions are being hammered. It then talks about how Brits are being hit by Tory austerity and that the country is paying the price for 12 years of failed Tory policies. This is because Rishi Sunak and the rest are ‘Consocialists’. The Reform Party, however, offer growth and prosperity based on lowering taxes and eliminating waste. But note the contradiction – lowering taxes and cutting waste is Tory policy, and it translates into lowering taxes for the rich and cutting services, particularly the welfare state. So, what’s all this bilge about ‘Consocialists’? I can only think it’s because when Covid hit, suddenly the Tories had to put cash into the economy to support the businesses that were closed and the people that couldn’t work due to the lockdown. And the Tory hard right, which includes Tousi and the others the ad is aimed at, have bitterly resented it ever since. I think if they’d had their way, they wouldn’t have initiated the lockdown but carried on with the nonsense about herd immunity. Which means letting the old and weak die in order to allow the rest to become immune to the disease. But the nonsense of ‘Consocialism’ also harks back to Farage nonsense about ‘Liblabcon’ and how they were all the same, with only UKIP being different.
No, the Tories are not socialists. They have cut welfare provision to the point where, for many of the most vulnerable people, it no longer exists. That’s why people are being forced to use food banks. The Tories fully support private industry and are covertly trying to privatise the NHS and convert it into a system of private healthcare funded through private health insurance like America’s. They were also behind the privatisation of the utilities, which has been a disaster. Privatisation has not brought greater investment, just further cuts to services in order to boost boardroom pay and shareholder dividends. As for tax, they have cut taxes – for the rich. These are all policies that Tice and his vile crew will follow if in they get into government. And the results will be the same: abysmally poor public services, mass poverty and ill health with a privatised health service.
The Tories and Reform are just two branches of the same party. Don’t vote for them.
Just noticed a very short piece of about two minutes in length on YouTube from GB News, in which ‘broadcaster Johnny’ somebody declares that the NHS cannot exist in its present form. Indeed, it can’t. It needs to be renationalised. But it’s being run down and privatised piecemeal ready for its full-scale sell-off by the Tories. Broadcaster Johnny whoever’s piece is part of this, preparing the public psychologically for its privatisation, making them believe that it would be A Good Thing. This alternative to the ‘woke, wet BBC’ has a long history of doing this. I’ve blogged about one of their presenters, Nana Akua, banging the drum for the privatisation of the health service and I don’t think she’s the only one there in favour of it by a long chalk. Outside of GB News there was now-jailed mad right-winger Alex Belfield mouthing off about how it should be privatised. And we’ve just had one of the viler Tories calling for it in parliament the other week, ’cause why should only the rich have private health insurance.
Beware. GB News claims to be on the side of ordinary people against the ‘woke’ establishment. But in this case, it is very definitely not your friend.
I’ve just been to the barbers for a haircut, and while waiting I leafed through some of the papers left out. One was the Heil, so I looked through that. Okay, I’m not proud of it, but it was something to read while waiting. Needless to say, it was as it usually is. There’s a story about the cost of housing asylum seekers and the channel migrants. But what really disgusted me was an opinion piece. This was by a supposed NHS consultant urging patients to ‘beg, borrow or steal’ to go private.
This is essentially the Tory strategy for running down the NHS, ever since Maggie Thatcher. She wanted the health service privatised and replaced by an American-style healthcare system funded by private health insurance. She was only stopped by a cabinet revolt and the finding of her personal secretary, Patrick Jenkin. Jenkin had been to America and knew exactly how poor in comparison the American system was. So Thatcher had to content herself with aiming to get 10 per cent of the population to take out private health insurance.
She also began process of piecemeal privatisation, selling off or opening up the ancillary services to private competition. This process was carried on by John Major’s administration and then by Tony Blair, who was ostensibly Labour. And Cameron, Tweezer and Bozo have in turn continued the wretched process. Private healthcare firms are allowed to compete with the NHS itself for contracts for medical services. Thanks to this privatisation, administration costs in the NHS have sky-rocketed where they approaching the levels -25 per cent or so – which the American private health system spends on administration. Privatisation does not bring savings. Quite the opposite. At the same time, the Tories have cut spending on the NHS, and grotty Tories like Truss and Mogg are saying they’ll cut more NHS ‘waste’. Meaning, presumably, more expensive privatisation and cuts.
The only way to cut waste is to renationalise the NHS.
But the article shows the direction of travel British healthcare is taking under the Tories: a two-tier system, with poor NHS services for the people at the bottom, and expensive private healthcare for those who can afford it. And the Tories stand to profit from it personally. Under Cameron, 100 MPs had personally connections to private healthcare firms.
If you really want to ensure that you and the rest of this great nation has the healthcare it needs and deserve, then kick the Tories and the other privatisers out, and demand the renationalisation of the NHS!
A few weeks ago Private Eye carried a review of Michael Ashcroft’s and Isabel Oakeshott’s book on the supposed failures of the NHS in its issue for 29th April – 12th May. Ashcroft is, I believe, the Tory donor now resident in Belize, and Isabel Oakeshott his pet journo, responsible for the otherwise uncorroborated claim that when he was at Oxford, David Cameron poked a porker. Now the two have written a book, Life Support, giving their critical analysis of the NHS and their suggestions for its improvement. The pair examine two hospitals, St. Mary’s in Paddington and King’s College Hospital in Camberwell, which they describe as being in run-down areas. St. Mary’s Hospital is in a dingy backstreet off the lower Edgware Road between the railway station and a long strip of burger joints, pawnbrokers and shops selling cheap luggage. King’s College Hospital occupies a neighbourhood where drug and gang crime are rife, and is filled with the victims of gang warfare.
The book claims that hospitals ” are badly run by management teams that tolerate waste, allow patient safety standards to slip”, whose bosses “prise over a culture of bullying and cover-ups and fail to grip budgets”, which is “terrible for taxpayers, terrible for NHS staff and potentially fatal for patients”. They also claim that the NHS has a code of omerta similar to the Sicilian mafia.
So what are their solutions to this crisis? Well, get rid of foreign doctors and health tourists, sell off a few hospitals, have people transform themselves into cyborgs and lose weight. They are suspicious of Indian doctors, because there is less regulation and greater corruption in their country of origin. When they start working in the NHS, they have a paternalistic attitude towards patients.
As for the health tourists, they gave as an example a Nigerian woman who flew in from Lagos so that she could have her triplets delivered by the NHS, complaining that ‘Part of the problem is that most healthcare professionals believe they have a moral duty to help the sick,, wherever they are from.’ After demanding the privatisation of a few hospitals, there’s a chapter, “Cyborgs: Futuristic Medicine” in which they encourage people to turn themselves into the real-life equivalents of Dr. Who’s Cybermen. But they claim that ‘Nobody is suggesting that thousands of patients will go to such lengths and attempt to become ‘full cyborgs'”.
They also attack the various fashion brands and social media influencers who they claim have made obesity fashionable, which they state is grossly irresponsible. Despite all this criticism, however, the book says precious little about the Covid pandemic, which has cause a crisis in the Health Service. The Eye’s reviewer states that it’s commendable that Ashcroft and Oakeshott are donating the profits from the book to NHS charities, but concludes
‘Any suspicion that the authors set out to slag off the NHS across 400 pages of ill-informed vanity-published guff but then had to bung some Covid stuff in the intro as events unfolded is surely nonsense’.
Let’s critically examine some of their recommendations. Firstly, many NHS doctors are foreign. During my illness, I’ve been treated by a number of South Asian doctors, as well as those from the Far East and eastern Europe. And I have absolutely no complaints whatsoever. I can’t speak for others, but I believe that they, and the other British and foreign staff gave me excellent care. I am not aware that NHS doctors from India have been found to be any less competent than others. This looks to me like a bit of racism on Ashcroft’s part. As does the bit about health tourists and the Nigerian woman. with triplets. I don’t blame the woman for wanting to give birth over here, than trust herself and her unborn children to medicine in her own country. And I thought it was a fundamental position of modern medical ethics that everyone has the same right to care, regardless of ethnic origin. Besides, Nye Bevan was aware that there would be people coming from less developed parts of the world to take advantage of the NHS, and considered that the Health Service would be more than capable of dealing with them.
There are indeed some very cool and advanced artificial limbs being developed, but some of these – the most advanced – cost tens of thousands of dollars. And despite the invention of dialysis and heart-lung machines, I am not aware that anybody has come close to creating mechanical counterparts of the kidneys, heart and lungs that can be implanted in the body. The idea of people turning themselves into cyborgs is, at present, Science Fiction.
Dr. Who’s Cybermen – the future of patients cutting costs for the NHS. From the Dr. Who Monster Book.
As for the demand that hospitals be privatised, this is obviously what Ashcroft as Tory donor and capitalist clearly wants. But it’s because of privatisation that NHS administrative costs have mushroomed and standards of care declined because of massive funding cuts. And as we’ve seen, privatisation actually leads to few hospitals and doctor’s surgeries as the companies running them close them down in order to maximise their profits. This is bad for taxpayers, who are having to fork out more for poorer service, as well as staff and patients. And it would also be a massive step towards the transformation of the Health Service into one operated through private healthcare companies and funded through private health insurance, like America.
But this is what is happening under the Tories and Blair’s New Labour, as these right-wing Thatcherite politicos seek to enrich themselves and their corporate donors in the private medical industry.Ashcroft’s and Oakeshott’s book are the latest in the propaganda campaign to tell you this is a good idea.
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